


body and soul revisited

by traveller



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-06
Updated: 2005-06-06
Packaged: 2017-10-15 13:16:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traveller/pseuds/traveller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>2000 words about Orlando and Viggo</cite></p>
            </blockquote>





	body and soul revisited

A page from a nature magazine arrives in the morning's post. On one side it shows half of an entirely too extreme close-up of a bluebottle fly, its hideous little eyes and sucker thing practically leaping off the page. The address is typed, the postmark is smudged: a gag from Dom, he assumes, Dom who finds Orlando's moth phobia to be a kind of bigotry and continues to insist that if Orlando just _pets_ the spider, he'll get over his paralyzing fear that the thing will leap for his throat.

He's in the middle of crumpling the page to bin it when he realizes it was the other side that he was meant to look at.

 _WINTERLESS_ it reads, the word printed in black marker on a blue sky over a shining bay. He knows the handwriting just like he knows the place, two hours north of Auckland, and he thinks he could still drive there, from memory, given the chance and a full mug of coffee.

It is a message, not a joke. Orlando traces half the W with his fingertip, his lips forming a word that is not written on the page but is there just the same.

::

The beach was made of silica, Viggo said, and that's why it squeaked underfoot; Orli had deliberately turned one heel on the wet sand and asked if it would make the same sound under bare shoulders.

"I knew a guy once, a glassblower, who-" Viggo began, but stopped as the words sunk in and Orli could see it on his face, understanding, and then more than that.

Orli licked his lips and smiled. Viggo's steps squeaked toward him.

"You were saying," Orli prompted. "About glass."

"You start with sand." Viggo closes and opens his hand, as if he had a fistful of the stuff. "For glass. Twenty-three hundred degrees, um. In the furnace. And they work with it like that, the ones who use just their, their breath."

Orli nodded. "Yeah?"

"If you breathe wrong, you die," Viggo said. He shrugged. "But it's just sand, really."

"Really," Orli agreed.

The tops of Viggo's thighs were the same pale color as the beach, but the rest of his skin was dark, and his limbs settled heavily over Orli's, fit just so and locked just right. They couldn't hear if the sand made any other sounds, too busy making their own.

::

Viggo detested quiet in the mornings; he was like Elijah that way, although Elijah's noise production was limited to music and grumbling, while Viggo was more inventive. Viggo sang horrible country songs _I was born a coal miner's daughter in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler_ , would slam doors and bang chairs and there was the thing with the cherry bombs in the canteen, but lucky for Viggo it was too late to replace Aragorn _again_.

In the mornings Viggo would break coffee cups just to hear them smash, would stomp on the wood floors as he made Godzilla noises and toppled cities built of laundry and books and magazines.

Orli would stay in bed until the last possible moment, pillow over his head, the duvet tucked tight like a cocoon until Viggo clomped up the stairs, his shadow dark in the pale dawn.

He would start by yanking off the duvet, then the sheet, then Orli's pyjama bottoms if he was wearing any; finally would drag Orli out by his ankle, kicking and screaming and clinging to his pillow. Viggo would laugh while Orli howled, and in the kitchen there was coffee waiting for him, every time.

::

 _For every clip and article and soundbite_ , Orlando writes on the page at the place where the sea and sky meet, trying to make his Sharpie print both tiny and neatly, _there are like a thousand things that are just ours. Just ours like all of us, the whole fellowship plus, but just ours, too. Me and you. I guess I didn't know I had to be reminded, but I did, so thanks. It's good to know that you are-_

He stops, crosses out the last line until it's just a smear.

 _-so thanks-for remembering for me, for keeping things... you used to always have an apple somewhere for me, hidden for me because you knew I'd get hungry and how I always forgot to eat, and how when I needed a haircut that time and you sat me down and shaved the sides of my head yourself so careful and cut the top bit and even though you said I wriggled the whole time you didn't cut me once. I told you this before but maybe not, you talk in your sleep and-_

Orlando is out of room, but he's sure Viggo will know what comes next.

::

"I'm not a child," Orli said; his voice was low but bristling with indignation.

"No," Viggo agreed. He tapped out his pipe on the log he was sitting on

The snap crackle of the fire filled the silence. Orli picked at the hole in the knee of his jeans.

"You don't have to keep defending yourself to me," Viggo said, and he hooked his finger around one of Orli's, tugged until he'd brought Orli's hand up onto his knee. Orli let him turn his hand over, let Viggo trace the lines there. "I'm sorry you think you need to. I'm sorry you think I'm putting you down all the time. I'm sorry I can't fucking _talk_ to-"

Orli twisted his hand and pulled; the air left Viggo's lungs with a huffing thudding noise when he hit the ground, the satin of their sleeping bags doing nothing to cushion the fall. They grappled and rolled, too close to the fire in one direction, and Orli bashed his head on a rock in the other, but he pinned Viggo in the end.

"Just say what you mean," Orli whispered to the seam of Viggo's chapped lips. "And mean what you say."

::

Viggo liked silence in the afternoons, on the rare days that they had an afternoon to themselves. He liked to go off on his own, to ride for hours until both he and his horse were exhausted, or to sit perfectly still on the end of the jetty, his breath as slow and steady as the tide.

"The sea is terrifying," he said once, when Orli had come and sat beside him for what seemed like an entire day but was probably no more than an hour.

Orli didn't prompt him to explain; the answer would either come or it wouldn't. He leaned his cheek on Viggo's bicep, and Viggo wrapped him in close, his fingers stroking Orli's elbow.

"It's like fate," Viggo said, hours or days later. "It's. It's irreversible. It's too big to get your mind around."

"So don't try," Orli suggested. He turned his head, his lips parting on the skin below Viggo's sleeve. "Just, like. Just. Oh. Look." He pointed. There was something shiny in the water; he splashed off the end of the jetty after it.

A coin, its face half-eaten by rust. Orli shined it on his shirttail, and pressed it into Viggo's palm.

::

A postcard arrives bearing a painting of a city on a hill, its churches and bridges and houses tucked into the creases of the landscape. In the background is a tiny churchyard; in the foreground, a river surges at angles; all under a stormy sky. The back informs Orlando that it is _View of Toledo_ by El Greco, that it was painted between 1595 and 1610, and that the card was purchased in the giftshop of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

One word is scrawled there: in pencil, in Spanish:

 _niebla_

When Orlando looks it up - in the battered dictionary that serves as a codebook for these communications - he finds that it means "fog."

He nods. It makes sense. He tears a cartoon tiger out of a coloring book he found in a taxi and replies,

 _Karma is confusing and sometimes painful but I think it is still worth it, even though it's not simple. Maybe it's worth it because it's not simple._

A few days later he finds his voicemail light blinking, a call missed by minutes. He hadn't heard it ring.

"I liked the tiger." Viggo says; that is the entire message.

Orlando laughs and dials.

::

If you asked Viggo what his favorite time of day was, sometimes he would say that every hour was each as precious as the next, and sometimes he would say it was whatever time it was that he got those two hours of sleep, and sometimes he'd shrug and say, "Tuesday."

But if you went down into the kitchen at about three in the morning (sometimes trailing the sheet you were wearing like a toga, sometimes wearing nothing at all) you'd find Viggo at the table with a pair of scissors and a pot of paste, or with a sheaf of paper and a pen, or flipping through a stack of photographs. You'd find Viggo with a slim volume of poetry and a beer, or a fat paperback of philosophy and a glass of wine.

Orli always knocked on the doorframe, always asked permission to enter the moment, and Viggo never once turned him away. Viggo would draw Orli down into his lap, his kiss sloppy and scratchy and sometimes a little drunk; Viggo would rub his thumb hard over Orli's nipple, would palm Orli's cock in one rough hand.

Orli's favorite time of day was this time, always this.

::

The veneer on Viggo's cheap bookcase was peeling away from the wood underneath, and Orli would lay on his belly and pick at it when he was pretending to look for something to read. The rug was soft and old, and the bit of floor right there caught the sun just right; Viggo would stretch out on his back next to Orli and conduct along with whatever CD was on, his hands arching and twisting with the rises and falls and rhythms of the music.

Viggo played Chet Baker for Orli, and Thelonious Monk and Coleman Hawkins; one time he went on a gorgeous ramble about jazz and chaos and sex and death and physics while Orli dozed with his cheek on Viggo's belly and somebody on the stereo made a saxophone whisper and laugh and cry.

When he woke it was getting dark and he had a tenacious grip on the edge of Viggo's shirt; Viggo's hand was cupped at the base of Orli's skull and he was snoring softly like the static hum of the speakers.

The things that Orli whispered just then were things he had never said aloud before, and didn't suppose he'd ever say again.

::

It's about three in the morning when the doorbell rings and the dog doesn't bark, just nudges Orlando's hand and pads down the stairs to wait there in the front hall. Orlando finds a pair of shorts and staggers down after, hands in his hair, his jaw cracking when he yawns.

The skin under Viggo's eyes is thin and bruised dark blue; he scuffs his boot heel on the step and says he couldn't sleep.

"I thought you were in New York," Orlando says stupidly.

Viggo's shoulders roll forward. "I couldn't sleep," he repeats.

"Come in," Orlando answers. He holds the door wide.

The dog licks Viggo's knuckles in approval; Viggo presses his face into Orlando's neck and Orlando can feel his smile.

They curl together, parentheses around pillows, and they don't talk about fame and they don't talk about movies and they don't talk about this girl or that boy. Their knees bump and their fingers tangle; they breathe each other's breath in the fading dark.

In a few days Viggo will disappear, leaving nothing but bruises high inside Orlando's thighs and a note written a scrap of brown grocery bag, but there will always be this, always this.


End file.
